


Prism

by ambiguously



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Gen, Post-Movie(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-04
Updated: 2016-05-04
Packaged: 2018-06-04 02:32:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,763
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6637471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ambiguously/pseuds/ambiguously
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Finn has been a soldier his entire life. General Organa won't let him be one now.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Prism

**Author's Note:**

  * For [anthean](https://archiveofourown.org/users/anthean/gifts).



The first thing Finn did after being discharged from Medical was to find General Organa in her office and offer his official enlistment in the Resistance.

The General shook his hand, and said, "Thank you for volunteering. You're fired."

Finn's mouth dropped open and he shut it just as fast. "I'm sorry?"

"You aren't signing up." She was busy, working her way through a stack of flimsies. A pair of spectacles perched on her nose as she spoke to him. "Was there anything else?"

"I don't understand. I thought the Resistance needed every warm body it could get." He'd thought a lot of things about the Resistance. He wondered if she'd have fired Rey if she was here.

"We do." She sighed. The spectacles came off and were set down. "Have a seat, Finn." She glanced behind her and nodded at a chair. "Bring that over."

Finn dragged the chair to her. "General, if you're worried I'm a spy, don't be."

"I'm not. You were vouched for by three people I trust implicitly." Three? Her face was a mask, and he knew one of them must have been Han. "I don't doubt your loyalty, Finn. I doubt your ability to make a decision yet."

"I've recovered completely. The med droids say I'm fine."

She folded her hands. "Tell me about your first memory."

He blinked. "Why?"

"I'm curious."

Finn thought back. "The First Order has a nursery. All of us were raised there. I remember staring at the patterns on the wall. There were shapes and colors." The General nodded, encouraging him to go on. "We played games. I learned to count and to read."

"Any friends?"

"We weren't supposed to make friends. We had numbers instead of names, and we switched around from room to room to keep from getting attached."

"When did they start teaching you how to fight?"

He shrugged. When didn't they? "The first thing I remember reading was a list of armaments."

"And combat?"

"We trained all the time. General, I'm a good soldier."

"I know." Her face crinkled as she smiled sadly. "You have been a soldier since you were a child. You've never known any other life. What kind of monster would I be if I put another blaster in your hand?"

He sat back. "It's different. I'm volunteering."

"And I will be happy to accept you as a member of the Resistance after I'm sure you are volunteering because you want to, not because you've been programmed to your whole life. Finn, everyone here is free. They come. They go. They choose to stay. I'm not asking you to leave. I know you don't have another home to go to. You're welcome to live with us. Figure out who you are besides a soldier, and if that man wants to join up, we'll be glad to have him."

Finn had been dismissed enough to recognize her tone. "Thank you, General."

"Go get something to eat. The food in Medical is awful. I don't understand why." She waved him off and turned back to her flimsies with a sigh.

Finn found the mess without trouble, and was served a tray full of food he didn't recognize. He sat alone at a table, wondering how to strike up a conversation with some of the others sitting nearby. Everyone seemed to know who he was, and starting out with, "Hi, I'm not allowed to join up yet," wasn't a good opening line.

He missed his comrades, missed the pile of people who used to be around him all the time. He missed Rey, who would be too cool to be bothered by not knowing how to make friends.

His reverie was broken by a friendly face. "There you are." Poe sat across from him with his own tray. "How'd it go with the General?"

"She told me I'm not allowed to volunteer."

"She said what?"

Finn explained, letting his disappointment take his appetite. Only when Poe made an annoyed look at his full tray did he pick up his fork.

"She has a point. You don't really have much of an idea who you are without a uniform."

"I can learn. I've learned a lot over the past week."

"Yeah, and I think you should. You gonna eat that?" Poe pointed to a wobbly thing on Finn's tray and picked it up with Finn shrugged. "What did you do for fun when you weren't training?"

"There wasn't much to do. We had games. They were strategy games, though. Some of the other Stormtroopers liked to watch holovids. I never got into them much."

"Did you spend time with friends?" The last of the wobbly thing disappeared, and Poe grinned widely. Finn guessed it was a dessert of some sort. The rest of his food wasn't too bad. Better than the First Order served, at least.

"I tried. I wanted to hang out with other people."

"What else did you like to do?"

He shrugged again, and then he really thought about it. "When we were small, they let us draw and paint. That ended pretty fast. I remember liking it."

"Then let's get you a drawing pad and some chalk. Or fingerpaints. Whatever. It's a first step. And we can hang out, too."

Finn turned in his empty tray, and Poe made him promise to wait back at the barracks. His friend showed up about fifteen minutes later. "This is what I could talk Requisitions out of. It's not much."

"No, it's great. Thank you." Finn looked at the small sketchbook with thick paper, and the irregular spray of pens and pencils Poe held in one clutched fist. There weren't any gifts in the First Order, not for birthdays, not for Life Day, nothing. No one had ever given him something for the sake of giving him a present. "Really, it's cool."

"I've got duty in a few minutes, but I'll be back later. You don't have to stay here. You can wander the base, go meet people. We can meet up later. All right?"

"Sounds good." Finn watched him go, then sat down with his new items. He didn't know what to do. He'd mentioned the drawing off-handed, just a small, bright spot in his otherwise dreary routine. Staring at the first blank page, he had no idea what to draw, or even if he wanted to draw. He set it down again.

He went for a walk.

People in the Resistance were friendly enough. They smiled at him. Many greeted Finn by name as he strolled. Seeing their faces thrilled him. He lingered by a trio playing a game with dice he didn't know. He watched two others for a while as they did their physical training run for the day. He watched the crush and flow of people, not ordered to fall into neat lines and call each other by number.

Filled with these thoughts, he went back to his bunk and stared at the blank page.

Poe came back a few hours later. "How's it going?"

"It's going." He closed the book quickly, but not before Poe saw.

"Artist's block?"

"I'm not an artist. It was just something we did in nursery." He set the pencils aside carefully. A gift he couldn't use was still a gift.

"Well, what else did you do today?"

"Took a walk. Met some people."

"Great. There's a holo showing in the mess tonight after dinner. We could go. You said you weren't into those much but maybe you'd like it." His face remained kind. Finn felt bad. Everyone wanted him to figure out who Normal Finn was, and Finn just wanted something useful to do.

"I guess. Sure."

They got dinner together, and Finn kept his dessert this time. He wasn't used to sweets and could only eat half of it before his stomach churned. Everyone turned the seats around, and the mess filled up with pilots and soldiers and command personnel. The holo plot wasn't good, something a little funny with a romantic subplot he couldn't follow. It was nice being around other people, though, and when they laughed, he felt safe.

After the holo, Poe ducked out for a while, maybe for work, maybe for a date. Finn went back to the barracks and picked up his sketchbook again. He remembered the way one of the pilots sitting with them had smiled, all lips and teeth as she laughed.

He picked up a red pencil and drew a giant mouth, all out of proportion. He drew in tiny teeth, and he remembered glimpses of people's mouths as they ate back in the mess back home. They kept their helmets on as much as possible, even encouraged to eat under them, but people always tipped them back.

He drew another mouth beside the first, cut off with half a mask.

The picture wasn't very good, but it wasn't terrible. He closed the book and went to bed.

The next day after breakfast, Finn took another walk. He started learning the names of the people he met along his way, committing a feature here and a clothing choice there to his memory with the name. He brought the drawing pad out into the sunshine with him and sat up against a building as he drew an oversized hairstyle, and small grey eyes, and a scarf that draped around the whole page in blue and green.

"Nice," Poe said when he found him later, painstakingly drawing a boot. "Your proportions are weird."

"I know." He didn't have any orange but he drew BB-8 like a bouncing red ball. They'd had balls to play with in the nursery, and he remembered playtime when they'd been allowed to throw and catch without having to play at war. BB-8 looked like the ball he recalled.

He started and stopped a few pictures of Rey. He knew what she looked like, but what was in his head didn't match what he managed to draw. He did a good sketch of one nimble hand, but the rest of the picture was a wash. Maybe when she got back. Maybe if she ever came back.

His back hurt him that night, now that he was no longer on his medications, and he couldn't sleep. He had a lot of black pencils, and covered a full page with dark scribbles, and one red crossed slash at the bottom. The picture didn't look like anything, which didn't matter. He tore it out of the book and crumpled it, ripping the page to shreds. He felt better and fell instantly to sleep as soon as his head hit the pillow.

The Resistance was moving their base soon. "D'Qar isn't secure," Poe explained. "The First Order took a hit when we knocked out Starkiller, but they'll be back." Packing wasn't combat, and Finn's hands were welcome help.

"Do you know where we're going?"

"Yes." Poe wouldn't tell him where. "It isn't that I don't trust you. It's that I'm not allowed to tell anyone who isn't in Command. We'll all get there soon enough."

Finn had no idea how they'd relay the new coordinates to Rey. Would they send a transmission to Artoo? Would she just know? Maybe Luke Skywalker would have some kind of psychic link with his sister, and they'd tell each other. Finn spent time some nights thinking hard at Rey, wondering if she could hear him from across the stars.

As the last of the barracks were packed up, he kept out his drawing pads, now on the third one, and his pens. He'd added more colors as supplies became available. He drew a picture of the hills outside the base they were leaving, and drew in a little sign that said, "We were here."

Aboard the transport that carried them all to the next site, he found viewports whenever he could and drew dark landscapes scattered with stars, and streams of light moving past their ships. Sometimes he caught a glimpse of the rest of the fleet, and he sketched long lines and truncated nose cones. They slept packed hundreds to a cargo bay for the two day trip, and he covered pages with nothing but the round shapes of heads sleeping in uneven rows.

The new base was on a planet more swamp than land, murky and filled with primal life. Finn spent the first three days getting used to the rotten egg smell that permeated everything and followed him into his sleep. He stopped minding when his boots soaked through over and over. When he pitched in to help build the new barracks, no one stopped him. Somewhere between Starkiller and here, he'd settled in as one of them.

"Got anything new?" Poe asked, a week into their stay. He was bone tired, and Finn wasn't any better. They'd found a place to sleep a little drier than the ground. Finn took careful steps to protect his books from the elements, only pulling them out when he was sure he wasn't about to get rained on.

"Not yet."

"You could take a break now."

Finn shrugged. "There's not much to draw."

"Sure there is. There's swamp. And trees. And those lizard things that almost took off your leg."

During the days, they worked. At night, Finn listened to the restless sleep of those around him, and scratched at his pad, drawing dripping fronds with huge puddles beneath them.

The base lasted a total of one month before they were attacked by First Order forces. Finn scrambled with the rest to a ship he still didn't know how to fly. "You can take gunner," said the pilot, a Rodian who'd joined up right after the destruction of the Hosnian System.

Finn took the gunner's chair, his back to the pilot. Chark. Right. Weapons systems had been drilled into his head since he was a small child. The swoop and turn of the little ship made his stomach do flips, but Chark kept them ahead of the enemy's fire and Finn took their ships down one by one until the fleet routed them.

As they swung around to set down, Finn saw below them that the barracks had been wrecked by blaster fire. "Looks like we're moving again," Chark said.

"Yeah."

Two bases and six months later, Finn was qualified on shuttles and useless at X-Wings. "I'm not passing you, sorry," Poe said, and no amount of promising to practice more was going to convince him. Annoyed, Finn had taken his latest sketchbook and found a comfortable place to sit. He was finished with his own duty for the day. Maybe he could draw an unflattering picture of his best friend.

Instead, his hand moved across the page without his input. Birds dotted the landscape here: giants with long legs and long, vicious beaks, and tiny flutterers no bigger than his finger. No mammalian life to speak of, no reptiles larger than the flutterers, and a lot of fish, and otherwise, the Resistance was the only life to be found on this world. He drew birds now, arching wings gliding on hot air currents, skimming the wind around them.

A shadow darkened his page. Poe was probably back to apologize by getting him a fizzy drink at the mess. Finn didn't look up.

"That looks nice. What are you drawing?"

His head shot up to see Rey with her guarded smile. She wore a traveling cloak over her clothes, and even with it, he could tell she'd been working hard, and he could see the smooth motion of her muscles as she crossed her arms. He'd heard a ship come in a little while ago and hadn't registered it was the _Millennium Falcon_.

"Birds." He gestured, feeling dumb.

Rey sat down beside him. The lines of her face were pinched. Something had changed in the time she'd been away. She'd probably learned a million Jedi things with Luke Skywalker. She may have fought in battles he could only imagine. Everything about her now said, 'Don't act questions. Let's just pretend we're normal, okay?'

He could pretend.

"This one's better," Finn said, flipping back a few pages. He'd spent a whole morning getting close to one of the largest birds, trying to capture the flicker of shifting light on its pinfeathers. Underneath, he drew an egg with the interior of the whole giant bird scrunched up in a curl inside.

"I like it," Rey said, and she sat with him looking at sketches until the afternoon shadows turned everything to oranges and browns and golds.


End file.
